Literary Birthday – 15 May – Samantha Hunt

I became a writer because I am the youngest of six children. I listen; I observe. I’m camouflaged as a moth. Mothers are unseen. It helps me write.

The lion’s share of my work is revision, 85%? I revise forever, combing over lines, listening and listening to them in different hours and moods so that I feel they are finally right for me.

I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there’s somewhere else hopeful to look.

John Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is very important to me as an influence. When I didn’t know how to start Mr. Splitfoot, I just wrote the first line of As I Lay Dying instead and then continued on. It’s dissolved in the text now, but it helped me start.

I think I write mostly about death and so it is interesting to hear how often people think I’m writing about pregnancy and birth. Though of course they are two sides of the same coin.

There is nothing more important to our survival, nothing more dignified than learning how to take care of others, how to serve and teach people with kindness and openness.

Much of the writing I do about the female body is to remind women, myself included, that they make life and they make death. That strikes me as a far more powerful stance than the weak lies told about mothering.

My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There’s something to that. Many of my favourite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

There’s a voice when I write. I speak everything aloud. My family is so accustomed to me talking to myself that often times they don’t answer me when I am trying to speak to one of them.